Category: too dorky for words

I made the easy choice not to watch a certain speech tonight. I caved for about two minutes and listened in just in time to hear some complete crazypants nonsense, so I turned it right off.

Instead of watching, I did some wondering. I thought about what I would have worn had I been invited to attend. It’s just not that easy for a fat woman to find an all-white outfit at a moment’s notice. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen such a thing in any of the stores or catalogs I shop from. I thought about how sad I would have been to be invited and have to turn down the opportunity because I had nothing to wear (which would maybe just have been an excuse to not have to put on a face of anything other than disgust or rage while listening to the lyingest liar in town bloviate).

But then I realized I had nothing to worry about. Had I received an invite, I would have just made a rush order from Ashro.com! I mean … of course! White suits and dresses? Check. White shoes? Check. Plus sizes? Check. Done and done.

But just to be sure, I clicked over to the website to see what my options would have looked like. I found my outfit in less that one minute:

But I couldn’t have gone in those heels. I haven’t been a heels girl in years. So what to do? I could have been semi demure:

At the same time, how many invites to the SOTU can I expect to receive? If I’d been asked, I’d have to go a little outside the expected, right? I found two more fun and comfortable-looking options, and it was a tough choice, but I think I’d go for the bling-y slip-on on the left:

Whew! And here I thought I’d have trouble creating a realistic fantasy! Planned my outfit and made some decisions about my hair just in time to tune in for Stacey Abrams’ stellar response! Perfect!

Oh yes, it’s Slice of Life Tuesday!
Click on over to see what the other slicers are up to this fine evening!

I had a meeting today with a friend who works for a partner agency. We needed to review some work we’d done on some grant applications. At one point we were talking about being mistaken for other people — something that had just happened to us both — and she commented on the fact that there are so many folks with my name working in our relatively small circle.

It’s surprisingly true. I have gone through most of my life knowing hardly any other people with my name. Years ago, the Fed Ex man who delivered to my office was named Stacy, and he thought our having the same name was hilarious. But he was really it, no one else sharing my name.

And then I came here, and I was suddenly surrounded. There was one fabulous moment when I was walking into a building with a Stacy and a friend who is a Stacie, and someone behind us called our name — she had spotted Stacy and wanted to say hi. She called our name, and we all turned in a perfectly choreographed move and said, in unison, “Yes?” So there were those two women, but there were also three others in other agencies that I work with and one in a program for helping high-skilled immigrants find work in their fields, and one who worked for one of the Deputy Mayors. So many!

So my friend commented on the abundance of Stacie-ness and said that her big concern was that she would spell one of our names wrong in an email, especially mine, as the others are all “y” or “ey” people (my dear “ie” friend has moved to Texas).

She found a helpful mnemonic for spelling my name correctly, however, and I couldn’t love it more. The initiative I have spent the most time working on since taking this job is integrated education and training, a little something we call “bridge” around here. It’s all about offering adult basic education or English language instruction combined with occupational skills training, helping people move more quickly toward their employment goals. My first 18 months on the job, I presented about bridge all over the place. I was the one-woman bridge roadshow. I even made a slide for a presentation that featured a cartoon me asking a lot of the questions I heard from people who weren’t sure what bridge was:

I very much want to be all about integrated education and training, want to eat, drink, and sleep it. That would make me happy, would be a real mark of a job well done for me.

What does any of this have to do with my name? When she needs to write me and wants to be sure she’s got the correct spelling, my friend says to herself: “Stacie — IE for Integrated Education.” It’s so perfect, so ridiculously fabulous, I can’t believe it never occurred to me! I’m done. Done. I love it like crazy.

It’s the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers! With hundreds of folks participating, there’s more than a little something for everyone … and plenty of room for you to join in!

Of course! Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day is coming, and I’ve started getting ready. For years now, I’ve gone around giving out poems — mostly at work, but not only at work¹ — so that people will actually have a poem in their pocket. Yes. Because no one ever actually has a poem in their pocket except me. It’s a shame, really. At my old job, people got used to this annual poem distribution behavior. And I realized the other day that some folks at my new job are already looking forward to it. Two people have mentioned that PIYP Day is coming, have asked if I’ll have more poems to give out.

I have a large supply of poems to share around that day — this is definitely not my first time at the PIYP rodeo — but my poem selection needs an update. I’ve been adding a new poem or two every year, but I think it’s time for a more significant overhaul. I’ve been grabbing some new things from poets I’ve recently come to love, but I want more. I haven’t lost any of my love for the poems that have lived in my PIYP grab bag for years — Langston Hughes and Dylan Thomas, Nikki Giovanni and Lucille Clifton will all stay in rotation — but I need more.

And I’m open to suggestions. Whose poems would you suggest? What should I add to the basket? Maybe you want to add something you’ve written to the group? That would be wonderful. So today, P is also for: Please share! Send me poems to look up, links to your faves, links to your work that you’d like to add to the selection.

Criteria for suggested poems:

Must be something you absolutely love.

Must be short-ish. I’ve noticed that people look daunted when they get a super-long poem. I’m not trying to trigger bad memories of the ways we were made to work with poetry with when we were in school, and long poems seem to do that to people, make them feel pressured in some way.

Must include author’s full name — and that includes you if you decide to send me some of your work.

(It’s a short list. I really would just love to read whatever you suggest!)

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Guess Again

I am not the one the girl you can pass over the woman who waits — still, doll-like, in the corner. No. I am hungry and I will eat everything, every everything until I decide I’m done. I will take handfuls armloads of the finest bits and they will be mine not for sharing, not for you, not for anyone but me, myself, I, I, I. Punto. Can you hear me now?

I have a surprising number of poems that have the same feel as today’s chōka, that have this same “I am not the one” thing going on. I should spend some time with that, thinking about what that is, where it’s coming from, who I’m talking to when I write it. Hmm … it’s an investigation for another time. Yes, because “P” is also for “Procrastination,” but more because I’m too tired to think clearly about much of anything at this moment. But definitely some exploration required. There are maybe as many as three other poems — maybe more? — that I’ve written in the last few years that run on this same path. Time to do some free writing, figure out what I’m thinking.

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A chōka is a Japanese form poem with a specific syllable count per line. The shortest form of chōka is: 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 5 / 7 / 7. The 5- and 7-syllable lines can repeat as many times as needed. The poem’s end is signaled by the extra 7-syllable line. The final five lines can be used to summarize the body of the poem.

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¹ When I had my first knee surgery back in 2013, I knew I’d be in the hospital on PIYP Day, so I packed an envelope of poems in my hospital bag and offered up poems to everyone who came to my room that day and everyone I saw on my PT strolls around the floor. (And don’t think my coworkers missed out because I as in the hospital. I left a basket of poems behind for them to choose from. Because I am nothing if not obsessive!) When I was back in the hospital for surgery #2 in 2015, there were folks who remembered getting poems from me, including one nurse who had hers tacked up at the nurses’ station!

I’ll admit that I’m a latecomer to the Oxford comma. I was forced to use it in grade school. But I was forced to do a lot of things with my writing in grade school, and many of them I heartily disagreed with and despised. Once I had a little more freedom to write how I wanted, I began to jettison those things I didn’t care for, and the Oxford comma fell by the wayside with the other castoffs. People have argued with me about it quite a bit over the years — which maybe says something about the folks I hang with¹ — but I have remained stubbornly against. I taught English for many years, and I taught the Oxford comma … but also made it clear that a) I didn’t use it myself and b) no one’s grade would be damaged by the decision not to use it.

But then I got my current job. I got this job, and one of the first things I had to do was edit the big, serious report we were producing. And before the editing began, I was asked to put together a style guide so that all of the people who were adding writing could try to have the same set of rules in mind as they worked and so that changes I made to text would all follow clear guidelines.

Making that style guide was, I have to admit, fun for me (which most definitely says something about the kind of person I am!). I saw the guide as my chance to lay down the law, list out my writing pet peeves, make our sleek and shiny report conform to my writing style. (Oh yes, a little power is truly a dangerous thing!)

Pretty quickly in my style-guiding I ran smack into the Oxford comma. And somehow, for reasons I couldn’t explain and can’t explain now, that comma suddenly made sense. Made perfect, why-didn’t-I-ever-see-this-before sense. And I’ve been using it ever since. (Somewhere, my 6th grade teacher is pointing, laughing, and saying, “I told you so!”)

It’s the 10th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Head over to Two Writing Teachers to see all of today’s slices

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¹ This wacky-grammarians-on-my-friend-list business did not extend to the guy who came to a party I threw years ago … who smugly diagrammed the sentences of the people who spoke to him. You may think this is a clever party trick. Trust me when I tell you that it really isn’t.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been a particularly spontaneous person. I’ve had moments here and there, but mostly not so much. Not an impulse buyer. Not a pick up and fly to Tahiti in the middle of a quiet Tuesday traveler. Not.

And I started out writing this because I was going to talk about my extremely mild run at spontaneity today — suddenly throwing out a dinner invitation and meeting up with a dear friend instead of heading home — but then I got distracted by “spur of the moment.”

What an odd thing to say: on the spur of the moment. And I went to The Google to find out the origin, and got this:

Spur of the moment is in the OED along with other definitions of the word “spur”. The first recorded usage was in 1801. Spur also means at haste so perhaps spur of the moment – something done impromptu or with out deliberation grew out of spur in that sense, as in a quick decision.

Something in the moment (the brief period of time when a decision is made or an action is begun) acts as a spur-an incentive, an impetus-much as the literal spurs impel a horse to go. What motivates a “spur of the moment” decision arises quickly, as opposed to long forethought.

And that’s all well and good, but Google gave me something much better. “Spur of the Moment” is, it turns out, the name of one of my favorite episodes of The Twilight Zone, an episode I’d only seen once but thought was really clever. In my head, it’s always been the “Face of Fear” episode, but that would have been way too heavy-handed as a title. Good thing Rod and Richard didn’t ask 18-month-old me!

“Spur of the Moment” was Season 5, episode 21, originally aired on February 21, 1964. As soon as I saw it in the search results, I set my slice-writing aside, went to Hulu and watched the episode. It holds up well enough, I guess. It’s not “The Invaders,” or “Eye of the Beholder” or anything, but it works. As was true when I saw it the first time, what really stands out for me is the repetition-with-a-twist of the opening scene. I like that shift in perspective, like using the same image to say something very different.

Ending my unplanned evening with an unplanned re-acquaintance with some classic TV. My variety of spontaneity is pretty seriously boring! But it pleases me.

Are you a “spur of the moment” kind of person? What things have you done spontaneously? Is your history with spontaneity as undramatic as mine? Do tell!

I had a ridiculously late lunch yesterday, walking out of my building at 3:15 to find something I could buy and eat quickly enough to be ready for a 4pm meeting.¹ I walked outside, turned the corner and immediately saw a man coming up the block. It took a nanosecond for my brain to do the processing:

I turned the corner and immediately saw a good-looking Black man with a nice afro coming up the block.

A familiar good-looking Black man with a nice afro coming up the block.

A familiar-because-he’s-famous good-looking Black man with a nice afro coming up the block.

But I was calm. Ish. I neither stopped walking and pointed frantically nor threw myself at him. Sadly, however, I couldn’t quite function well enough to either take out my phone and snap a pick, or better still, take out my phone and ask to take a selfie with him. Alas. All I could do was stare (yes, very cool). He gave me a knowing smirk and kept it moving.

Neil deGrass Tyson, people!

“The atoms of our bodies are traceable to stars that manufactured them in their cores and exploded these enriched ingredients across our galaxy, billions of years ago. For this reason, we are biologically connected to every other living thing in the world. We are chemically connected to all molecules on Earth. And we are atomically connected to all atoms in the universe. We are not figuratively, but literally stardust.”

Is it any wonder I was starstruck? As Dr. Tyson so grandly informs us, he’s made of “star stuff.”

It’s the Slice of Life Story Challenge! Head over to Two Writing Teachers to see what the rest of the slicers are up to … and to post the link to your own slice!

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¹ Ha! As if I could kid you that I had anything in mind other than pizza!

Like a fair number of people, I have a phone that allows me to send texts. This may be a bigger deal for me than for some, seeing as I still used a rotary phone as recently as 2007, seeing as I am writing this post with a fountain pen in my (handmade) notebook rather than composing directly on the computer.

I send a lot of texts. When I started texting, my phone struggled to understand me, inserting a lot of randomness into my notes … and a lot of deleted expletives. Yes, my phone thought I had a vocabulary like a stevedore. I would type “bookish,” it would come out “b****.” I would type “folkways” (yes really, folkways … hey, I’ve already explained that I use words other people don’t), it would come out “f***.” Clearly my phone and I had some serious disconnection issues.

Over time, of course, my phone has gotten to know me better. It no longer thinks I swear like a sailor. It still offers up wacky next-word options that I would surely never want to type. If I spoke the way my phone wanted me to, I’d be some kind of crazy, unintelligible philosopher, saying things such as, “I’m going on an adventure containing myself home.” Right. Because aren’t we all?

This morning, however, I realized my relationship with my phone has become a true luv thang.

I was typing an email to my sister and one of the sentences began: “I was missing … ” I was writing a very boring and ordinary exciting, “I was missing something important.”

Not for my phone I wasn’t.

I typed, “I was missing …” and my phone knew exactly what I needed to say, offering up: VONA!

Because of course, yes. Aren’t I always kind of missing VONA? Thank goodness our retreat is next week so I can get a fix!

It’s the annual Slice of Life Story Challenge, hosted by the wonderful people over at Two Writing Teachers! Every day this month, hundreds of writers will be posting their stories. Head on over and check out the other slices!

Just to be clear …

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about a lot of things. I also have a job. The thoughts and feelings expressed on this blog are mine. They have nothing to do with my job and are certainly not in any way meant to represent the thoughts or feelings of my employer.